Today I did something called “fire and ice.”
On paper, it’s simple enough:
148°F sauna.
44°F cold plunge.
Three cycles.
In reality, it felt like stepping in and out of two very different worlds: one where everything inside me wanted to melt, and one where everything inside me wanted to survive.
I did three full revolutions of the cycle, ending with a three-minute soak in the cold plunge. Three minutes that felt like an hour. When I finally got out and let my body warm up naturally over the next ten minutes, my joints still carried the cold like a memory.
This isn’t for everyone.
But for me, it did something I’ve been struggling to do in regular life: it cleared the noise in my mind.
The Fire
The sauna was the easy part.
148 degrees is hot, but it’s a familiar kind of discomfort. You sit, you sweat, your breathing gets heavier, your heart rate climbs, and your mind does what it always does at first: negotiates.
How long are we staying?
Is this good for me?
What’s the optimal time?
My brain loves metrics. It loves to optimize. Even in a wooden box designed for heat and silence, it still tries to turn the moment into a project plan.
But after a few minutes, the heat did its thing.
My thoughts didn’t disappear, exactly, but they became less important. It was like the temperature created a priority list for my nervous system, and “figure out your life” dropped somewhere below “don’t overheat.”
There’s something oddly cleansing about that. The heat pushed me out of rumination and into something simpler: breathe, sweat, stay.
The Ice
Then came the cold plunge.
44 degrees.
The first second is always a lie.
Your brain goes, Oh, this isn’t so ba—
And then the rest of your body reports in.
It’s a full-system alarm: skin, muscles, lungs, heart. Everything suddenly very awake. The instinct is immediate and loud:
Get out.
In those first moments, there isn’t room for overthinking. There’s just shock, breath, and raw sensation.
Time shifts in cold water.
Ten seconds feels like a minute.
A minute feels like three.
Three minutes feels like forever.
I stayed.
Not because I’m some stoic master of discomfort, but because I was curious what would happen if I didn’t immediately obey the “get out” voice.
So I focused on my breath. I watched my mind ping between panic and presence. I felt my body negotiate with itself:
We’re okay. We’re not dying. This is intense, but we’re okay.
And beneath the alarm, something else started to appear:
Silence.
Not outside silence — the room was the same — but an inner quiet I don’t touch very often. The kind that only shows up when all the usual mental noise gets temporarily replaced by something more primal: stay, breathe, endure.
For those three minutes, there was no space for old stories, what-ifs, or catastrophizing.
There was just the cold and the choice to stay with it.
The Afterglow (and the Echo of Cold)
When I finally climbed out of the plunge and sat down, I let my body warm up on its own. No hot shower, no rushing the process. Just ten minutes of slowly thawing.
Even an hour later, my joints still felt the cold. Not painfully, more like an echo. A reminder that I’d taken my body somewhere unfamiliar and asked it to trust me.
That’s what stuck with me the most:
I willingly put myself into a controlled version of something my nervous system usually tries to avoid at all costs: extreme discomfort. And instead of abandoning myself in it, I stayed present.
I didn’t dissociate.
I didn’t numb out.
I didn’t make a joke to escape the moment.
I just… stayed. With myself. In the cold.
Why This Feels Bigger Than a Wellness Trend
It would be easy to treat “fire and ice” like just another wellness hack:
- boosts circulation
- resets the nervous system
- releases endorphins
And, of course, there’s science, benefit, and protocol behind all of this.
But for me, today, it was something simpler and somehow bigger:
It was a practice in being with what is hard without immediately running away.
The sauna and plunge gave me a safe container to do something I’ve been trying to do emotionally:
- sit with discomfort,
- feel the full intensity of it,
- and realize I can survive it without having to fix it, explain it, or escape it.
In the cold plunge, my mind wasn’t looping on past mistakes or future fears. It was fully here. Fully now. Not because I became enlightened, but because my body demanded presence.
Sometimes, survival mode is exactly what we need — not the chronic, exhausting kind that runs in the background of daily life, but the acute, honest kind that pulls us straight into the moment:
You’re here. You’re alive. Breathe.
This Isn’t for Everyone (And That’s Okay)
I mean that sincerely.
Not everyone needs or wants to sit in 148-degree heat or drop themselves into 44-degree water. For some people, that’s not just uncomfortable, it’s unsafe. There are gentler ways to meet yourself.
This isn’t a prescription.
It’s a story.
A story about how, today, fire and ice gave me something I’ve been missing: a break from the endless chatter in my head, and a brief, powerful reminder that I can do hard things without abandoning myself.
For now, that feels like enough.
And maybe that’s the real lesson:
Sometimes, the path back to yourself isn’t soft lighting and calm music.
Sometimes, it’s a hot box, a freezing tub, and the choice to stay with yourself when every part of you is screaming to run.
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